A trio of musicians originally hailing from Flin Flon have combined forces to create a new album.
Orelands is a three-man group, with each member raised in Flin Flon before moving on to different locales to pursue music. Bassist Scott Ellenberger, guitarist, singer and songwriter Jay Hovland and drummer Dean Martin are the three men behind the band, who released their first album, a nine-track effort called Secrets and Select Missions, on Dec. 21 on We, Here & Now Records.
All three first learned their craft in the city built on rock. The three had each played music in their youth up north, including sometimes as part of the same group or jam session, but rarely if ever together as a three-piece.
“I had played in a band with Dean in high school. It was my first band, a cover band. Scott and I had known each other, we’d jammed and stuff like that, but we hadn’t really played in a band at that point,” said Hovland.
“We were playing in each other’s bands. We had a jam house, beside Dave Gunn’s place on Main Street - we set up a jam room in our bedroom and partied there every day, we would jam, we were learning our instruments, cutting our teeth,” said Martin.
“Then we all, separately, moved across the country. We all found bands to play in and we travelled and toured and put out records, made videos, travelled all over Canada, slept on each other’s floors when we could. That’s when we would get to visit each other.”
Both Ellenberger and Hovland ended up in Winnipeg - both played together in a band called Dust Adam Dust for a time. Hovland also appeared in bands like National Monument and Chorus of Verses, while Ellenberger played for Mahogany Frog for almost two decades. Martin went his own way, leaving for Calgary, where he swung the sticks for several bands, most notably for bands like The Ex-Boyfriends, FOONYAP and the Roar and The Summerlad, who he drummed with for over a decade. All three musicians stayed good friends while chasing the dream down, both together and separately.
During years apart and mid-tour jams and chats, all three had an idea of combining forces to create a band made up of Flin Flonners, but projects and life got in the way until recently. A band Hovland had been in ended, opening up time and giving just the spark he needed to help kick things off.
“When you have time, you can be lazy and just wait around for lightning to strike, or you can just make something happen. I thought it was a perfect time and space to revisit some ideas and put this together - and the first people I thought of were Dean and Scott, incredibly talented musicians who played in a number of very cool bands,” he said.
“Collectively, there was always this fun idea of, ‘We’re doing it with all these other bands - what if we ever came back collectively and made a record of Flin Flon musicians?’” said Martin.
“Jay recently made that happen. He had some songs and he told me, ‘Put some drums on top of them, let’s see if this is something we can make happen.’ It took me a couple months for me to figure that out and its taken a long time for this project to come together, but it finally has and it’s a wonderful, fun project.”
Making the album proved to be a challenge. The three musicians never physically sat in the same room while making it, instead doing individual parts, with the final mix being done by Grant Trippel at Exchange District Studios in Winnipeg. Hovland and Martin recorded the drum parts last summer while Hovland came up to visit family, while Hovland and Ellenberger did other parts elsewhere.
“I would call it a recording experiment for Jay - this style of songwriting. As we were weiting the songs, they were kind of finished but not recorded and they would change, even without having an actual jam room session going,” said Ellenberger.
“Musically, I guess it’s a culmination of many different years of experimentation with different writing styles,” said Hovland.
Word of the project eventually reached Ontario-based independent label We, Here and Now, who published the album both in digital form and as limited-edition cassette tapes.
When it came time to name the group, the trio agreed to name it Orelands, not after the similarly named Oreland Hotel but in tribute to the ore that led to Flin Flon’s creation. The hometown they each share helped provide a common link through the project - even inspiring a music video created by Winnipeg-based artist Patrick Michalishyn, featuring recoloured and distorted scenes from the famed 1978 National Film Board vignette featuring Flin Flon.
“He loved the song and he really took his time, feeling out the movements of it, how it felt,” said Ellenberger.
The band’s members say the songs on the album itself have a warm, dream-like feeling to them, straddling the fence between pop and rock on some tracks, even venturing into more psychedelic moments. The three mention bands like British psych-rock legends Hawkwind and Canadian indie rock stalwarts The Besnard Lakes - also named after a northern locale - as groups they think of when they hear the final record.
“When I originally first heard the tracks, I thought it was kind of shoegazey, kind of pop, kind of Beatles-esque,” Martin said.
“There’s bigger themes than specifically Flin Flon, but there’s a running theme of the energy we bring to the music being core of Flin Flon - we’re from here and the ideas that we put forth kind of are germinated from that,” said Hovland.
Secrets and Select Missions is available for purchase on Bandcamp.
